Phonological awareness represents a broad skill encompassing the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds within spoken language. This includes identifying and working with rhyming words, syllables, onset-rime segments, and individual speech sounds. An example of a phonological awareness task is identifying words that rhyme or breaking a word into its constituent syllables.
Phonemic awareness, however, is a specific and crucial sub-skill of phonological awareness. It refers exclusively to the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemesthe smallest units of soundwithin words. Its significance lies in its direct correlation with reading development. For instance, a phonemic awareness task might involve segmenting the word “cat” into its individual sounds: /k/, //, /t/, or blending those individual sounds to form the word.
